press

Overview

HISTORY

Volumio project was born in late 2013, just after the release of the first Raspberry PI model. I was personally frustrated by the lack of valid solutions to emancipate digital music playback from ordinary PC, usually loud, big and unconvenient machines to place in a living room. As an afternoon project, I developed a minimal audio-oriented Linux Distribution called RaspyFi and made it available via a small blog. To my great surprise, it gathered lot of attention and a very constructive response.
This initial low committment project evolved during the years, becoming what is now Volumio, and turned into a full-time committment.

DESCRIPTION

Volumio is a free and Open Source Linux Distribution, designed and fine-tuned exclusively for music playback. It runs on a variety of devices, typically small and cheap computers like the Raspberry PI, but also on low power PCs, notebooks or thin clients.
By flashing (installing) Volumio on any of this platforms, it will then become an headless Audiophile Music Player. Headless means that the only way to control it will be with another Mobile phone, computer or tablet.

This is made possible by Volumio’s UI: a web applications that runs on any device with a browser, and that allows an easy and intuitive control of your playback sessions. All communications beetween the webapp and Volumio will happen trough your home network.

FEATURES

Runs on Raspberry PI, UDOO, Cubox-i, Odroid, PC, Mac and a variety of other small devices

Minimal operating system, tailored for Bit-Perfect Audio Playback

Works with any USB 2.0 DAC

Raspberry PI and Odroid I2S DACs supported natively

Supports all filetypes: FLAC, Alac, Aac, Vorbis, Mp3, DSD etc

UPNP Playback

Airplay Playback

DSD Over PCM support, for non Direct-DSD compatible hardware

Integrated WebRadio directories

If a compatible wireless hardware is found, Volumio will create an hostpot network for first configuration

Plugin support with new functions available like Spotify and Digital Room Correction

Seamless update system: no need to reinstall when a new version is available

Multilanguage with a growing number of translations available

Image background support, even your favourite one

Alarm and sleep function

PROJECT MISSION

Volumio is now a company, INTUITU, which still retains the original principles of the project, and trying to continously improve project’s quality, impact and outreach.
Our guidelines are:

Keep the project as open as possible. We strongly believe that Free and Open Source Software is beneficial not only for ethical and philosofical reasons, but also will make our project better in the medium and long term. Volumio has originated, during those years, lots of forks. Which in turn generated competition, which in the end increased our efforts to push our standards to higher levels.
3 main product features: sound quality, ease of use, ability to play any kind of music source. Volumio is often referred as a “no-frills” Audiophile Music Player, and this is one of the most appreciated aspects of it. As in many other engineering and social fields of applications, simplicity is the ultimate sophisticacy and we’re committed to keep it that way (even if we focused a lot on aestethics, since its an important part of the usability experience).
Develop a sustainable monetization and growth plan. Volumio as a company helped various OEMs engineer and develop tailored music solutions. This not only helped the project financially, allowing us to work on it on a full-time basis, but lots of the improvements and modifications were incorporated in the software stack you can download for free. In parallel, the shop and premium subscriptions will help the project with a stable revenue income, granting the assurance our customers, partners and users to have an ethically proven and financially solid company to rely on.
Foster critical thinking and user education on audio matters. There’s no other field in technology that relies on myths and weak informations as the audio industry. Our goal is to promote a scientific, where possible, approach to digital audio.